Source:
New York TimesIn contrast to the way science is usually done, the research overseen by the F.B.I., which took seven years to finish, was highly compartmentalized. The scientists, who work at academic institutions, say they did not understand important details of the case until a news conference on Monday — which they and their scientific directors in the F.B.I. attended. For the bureau, the compartmentalization was an essential safeguard against the nightmare that one of their many advisers might turn out to have prepared the attack anthrax. “It may have been in people’s minds that someone in the room could have been one of the perpetrators, which ended up being the case,” said Dr. Chris Hassell, the F.B.I. laboratory director. ...
With the morph, the attack strain was at last developing a genetic signature of its own. Though 99 percent of its spores were identical with the Ames ancestor, some 1 percent or less were morphs. Dr. Ravel was asked to decode seven more morph genomes, a task that took two years. He could do only one at a time for fear of cross-contamination in his laboratory. Dr. Fraser-Liggett said she did not know why the F.B.I. did not ask other laboratories to share the task and speed up the critical process. One of the many mysteries the TIGR team had to live with under the bureau’s management was the puzzle of why the attack spores contained as many morphs as they did. At the news conference they learned why, when an F.B.I. scientist explained that the flask in Dr. Ivins’s custody, known as RMR-1029, held the product of 13 production runs of anthrax made at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground and 22 spore preparations made at Fort Detrick. Some 160 liters of material, the scientist said, had been concentrated into the liter held in the RMR-1029 flask. The vast number of spores, and the many different culturing procedures, Dr. Keim said, “guarantees you will see these mutants, and when you mix them together you will have a characteristic signature.”
Other scientists chosen by the F.B.I. selected four of the morphs as having the most reliable indels. All the attack letters contained these four morphs as well as the predominant form of Ames ancestor-type spores. The bureau at last had a signature of the attack strain. Hoping for just this breakthrough, the bureau had been building a repository of Ames anthrax samples, taken under subpoena from laboratories around the world. As the morphs became available, the F.B.I. started testing samples. At first, some had one or two of the morphs. None had three of the morphs. By late 2005 to 2006 it became clear that just eight of the 1,070 samples collected included all four morphs. And one of the samples was the ancestor of the other seven. The seven samples came from Fort Detrick and one other laboratory in the United States, F.B.I. scientists said at the Monday news conference, held at F.B.I. headquarters. ...
There, the scientific conclusions end. The bureau then began a second phase of the inquiry, that of ascertaining who had access to the flask and its seven descendants. The F.B.I. investigated almost 100 scientists who had had access to cultures from the flask or were in some way associated with them. At the news conference, it emerged that Dr. Ivins had in fact submitted two samples of RMR-1029, one in February 2002 and a second in April 2002. The second tested negative. The F.B.I. rejected and destroyed the first sample because it had not been prepared according to a strict protocol that the F.B.I. says Dr. Ivins helped in devising. ...
Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/science/21anthrax.html?hp
This article speaks for itself.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
